


A trunkful of dreams

by CopperMask (Hard_boiled_candy)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Metafiction, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 11:24:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16428467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hard_boiled_candy/pseuds/CopperMask
Summary: A Supernatural fan who lives in Vancouver starts taking beta blockers, and nocturnal hijinks with the cast, in and out of character, ensue.





	A trunkful of dreams

After she started taking blood pressure medication, Lis Thornton, aged 60 and the kind of person that the medical expression ‘grossly normal’ was made for, began to experience a series of uncanny dreams. It only lasted a couple of weeks, but it messed her up soundly while it was happening.

At first it was privately embarrassing and nothing more. She understood that dreams were not prophetic, or necessarily meaningful, but it had been many years since she’d had a dream that had been memorable, let alone meaningful. The first dream was only about thirty seconds long, but it gave a hint of what was to come.

 

Blackness, punctuated by sound. A very annoyed man’s voice said, apparently from inside her head, “Fun fact, the Big Empty is where _all_ the ideas come from.”

Lis blindly reaches out and down, and she can feel a trench coat belt and belt-loops, just like the one she felt up for laughs when she was in the local thrift store just the other day, and she gasps. The coat is empty and flaps in her hands.

She can feel her mouth move to say, “Castiel? Where is he!” and she stamps her feet to get a sense of what the ground is like.

Bad idea.

It lets go; she falls, not just for the scary second of a dream, but for a long time, in darkness.

The darkness breaks and she’s falling still, and Dean is looking up and watching her in horror as she impacts the Impala.

 

Lis wakes up, scared like no dream has ever made her, not since childhood. Sweat trickles down her spine and her hair’s stuck to her head. In spite of herself, she laughs shakily.

She and her fanfic pals have a saying. “Don’t fuck with the timeline!”; that dream was Season 13 Cas with Season 2 Dean and that is simply _not_ acceptable.

Lis addresses her dream-spirit with a terse: _Do better next time._ Strangely, this boot in her own brain’s ass (as Dean himself might put it) is enough to allow her to sleep, after her heart rate drops to something humane.

 

She has another dream after she goes back to sleep, but the Boys in Plaid don’t come back; instead, she’d being chased across her yard by a pack of howling dogs and the house is full of plastic jointed spiders that all start to robotically move when she tries to get back in. She runs back outside but she’s in an English formal garden in the eighteenth century and her clothes are completely wrong and she wakes up again.

 

She can’t help rolling her eyes at herself as she lies there, puffing a little from the stress of the dream. This is all her own arcane neurochemistry, topped up by the beta blockers. Why on earth would she _stay asleep_ to flee robot spiders and _wake up_ when she’s wearing jeans to a Jane Austen party?

 

 _Stop. This. Right. Now._ She thinks it at her dream-spirit, who hasn’t given her this much to play with since she had her kids, half a lifetime ago.

 

The rest of the night, all two hours of it, passes in restful if too-brief slumber.

 

The next night, she’s barely asleep before she’s sitting across the map table at the bunker with Sam. The dream lasts about three minutes. He’s sighing, tapping at a laptop, sipping at what is clearly a long-cold cup of herbal tea. Occasionally his hair falls across the planes of his dear, dear face. Every line and furrow as he studies the screen seems like a friend, with their own name and history. She longs to rise and smooth his hair back, motherly and chaste, and mess with his beard scruff in a far from motherly way — this must be season 14 Sam — but the dream holds her fixed in her seat.

She looks down at her hands. She knows Dean’s hands from a decade of study, and she wakes up, absolutely terrified, for no good reason, except that the idea of wearing Dean as a meat suit, when she knows he’s an actor named Jensen Ackles, is so disturbing she feels almost sick.

 

 

The disquiet follows her through her ordinary day; making tea and forgetting it’s there and nuking it to reheat it and forgetting that too. Reading the local paper. Finishing some baby clothes for a gift. Catching up on the book club reading.

 

 

All her fanfic friends live in places like a suburb of Athens, Greece, or on the same island as Manila in the Philippines or in a beat up industrial town in Russia or in a tourist town in Austria. All except one. Gabby lives only a few blocks away and they’ve literally only seen each other (so far) at Supernatural conventions, which is hilarious, since they both live in Vancouver.

This dream wackiness qualifies as a Supernatural emergency if ever one happened in real life, so Lis texts her, “It’s decoder ring time,” and waits for Gabby to let her know when she’s available.

Lis is retired. She’s always available - she doesn’t even have a grandchild to watch since the kids took off back to eastern Ontario after the housing crunch in Vancouver, and her granddaughter Misha is thus growing up at the end of Skype calls which invariably end with Lis promising swag. She dissects every episode with her daughter…on Facebook. They talk on the phone; it’s her granddaughter who insists on Skype. It’s not enough family, but she makes do, and she has, in a way, another family.

Gabby has four kids and five (yes, five) ex-husbands. She’s a force of nature, and Lis is always happy to peel even a tiny bit of time from her day. She’s possibly the biggest Supernatural fan on the planet, with a typing speed once clocked at 98 wpm (98 per cent accuracy, too, just to round out the unfairness of it all) and a talent for grinding out ever more ludicrous plots for #destiel #crackfic. Her episode knowledge is encyclopedic.

And Gabby is a true talent — with 45 pieces over 5,000 words on AO3 and a 12,000 word fan favourite about Castiel’s adventures when he gets turned into a sentient leather glove for a day that’s on every rec list even marginally associated with the fandom.

So Gabby should be _most_ entertained by Lis and her nocturnal ramblings with the cast. God knows what stories it will spawn; Gabby writes like a demon, but marinates ideas like an angel, and her thought processes are neither direct nor obvious.

“Sorry kiddo, I’m up to here with kid costumes and baking and the Pizza Man is outta town until, like, next week. I can’t catch up in person until the fifteenth of November at the earliest.” The Pizza Man is her third husband and father of three of the kids and the one who normally does the childcare.

“I should have more to tell you about then. I’ve been reading up on the side effects and I’m probably in for more wacky dreams.”

“Keep good notes. Try to have sex with at least one of them, okay?”

“I have heard in lubricious detail exactly what you’d do to J2M if you all negotiated hall passes and I am _not_ you, especially being as how I’m old enough to be your mother.”

“You’re not _dead_ yet,” Gabby said, with drawling sarcasm. “Please don’t put that in the dishwasher!” she sang out, and, abruptly, the call was over.

 

 

“What have you got for me tonight, Chuck, you ever-lovin’ bastard?”, Lis murmured to the luminous stars stuck to her bedroom ceiling.

She barely closed her eyes and Jensen Ackles, in a hiatus beard, shirtless, was looking up from between her legs and grinning.

“NO no no no no!” Lis yelled, and danced away backwards because _he had no tattoo_. The bed was now huge. Jensen disappeared off the end of it, his gorgeous face (marred by that shit-eating grin) sinking like the sun, and the bed is now the Newton Wave Pool.

HULLO DREAM LOGIC I AM IN YOU.

Dick Speight’s sitting lotus amid a brilliant pink inner tube, surrounded by screaming local kids, and Lis sputters up through the water, “You’re the director, make it PG!” There’s a big difference between reading about it and living it. Or dreaming it. Whatever. Who knew she was such a fricking prude.

One eye opens, then the other. It’s a puzzled frown.

“We’re surrounded by children,” Dick said in a kindly voice. “There will be absolutely no sex in this portion of the dream.”

“I want a _plot_ in this dream,” Lis heard herself say. The inner tube falls away.

Lis is irked. “For God’s sake, this is stupid, this is an angelic encounter from _another_ show with supernatural elements, and I’m just _borrowing_ it.”

They were now standing on a narrow mesa, about a million feet in the air, just like in _Saving Grace_.

“It’s all pretty much been done,” Dick admitted. He stuck his finger in his cheek and made a popping noise. It echoed through the canyon in Sensurround, like something from a Robin Williams live show. The shamelessness of it was very appealing.

Lis thought that as long as they were being honest, she might as well pan for gold. “And now the writing hardly matters; we’re coasting on the charm of the principals.”

“Speak for yourself, ya butthead, some of us are still working our tiny little heinies off.” Dick shook his head and left her on the mesa, which tilted. Before she started to fall, she heard someone yawning, and woke up.

 

Lis fired up the laptop and wrote it all down, stupid as it was. She couldn’t get back to sleep afterwards and re-read half of You Can Keep Holding On and told herself she was retired and if she wanted to sleep until noon she was welcome to. She fell asleep again around four in the morning, and she had a super boring dream about cooking and doing laundry and then when she was going to bed a Leviathan sprung out of the corner of her bedroom and ate her alive. She woke screaming.

 

She tried leaving the lights on but there was no way she was sleeping again after _that_.

 

Lis walked four miles that day, doing a grocery shop with her bundle buggy, trying to get so tired that she’d be able to sleep soundly. It worked.

 

She was at her grandparents’ cottage in Muskoka, and it was in the 1970’s and she was on the beach at night watching the Northern Lights and providing nourishment to ravenous hordes of mosquitoes. She keeps slapping herself.

“It’s beautiful,” a voice says. Sam or Jared?

 _Beanie and hoodie; this is Jared. There’s no need to reply._ It _was_ beautiful, and if her neurochemistry is insisting on sharing of her favourite memories with one of her favourite actors, no words are required.

When she turns to look back, he’s Sam, back in plaid and jeans. He glows, not the icy blue of angels, but as if he’s a Lalique lamp with an underpowered bulb, light gently radiating from his face and hands. Still glowing, he rises and makes to leave.

Alarmed, she hears herself speak. “Where are you headed?”

“I have to save Dean,” Sam said.

“Didn’t see _that_ coming.” Lis says it with a fine, flat tone, and watches him walk away, purposeful and swift. Light briefly reflects off the trees, and then he’s vanished into the murk. She turns back to look at the green and yellow haze of light pouring down from the dome of the sky, but Sam must have taken the light with him. There’s nothing to see.

It’s quiet, and overcast; no stars. She feels the piney air fill her lungs. Behind her, over her shoulder, she hears the familiar sound of the screech and bang of the screen door on the back deck, and then her grandmother calls her in for hot cocoa, and she wakes up.

For the first time in her life that she can recollect, she wakes up into another layer of dream.

She’s in her own bed, in her own apartment, and Misha Collins, wearing a ball cap, t-shirt and jeans, and a startled expression, is sitting on the office chair next to her desk.

By the time he’s taken her (grabbed me _by the hand, what the fuck dude where is the consent oh yeah that would be my brain talking_ ) to stand on her balcony, a script — paper layers of blue, white and yellow — is in his hand.

“Is that a shooting script?” Lis exclaims, bug-eyed.

“I have no fucking idea,” Misha says, humbly. “Are you a fan of Supernatural?”

“Uh,” Lis says.

“Guess not,” Misha says. “Interesting.” He looks at the script and laughs that squeaky endearing laugh that makes all the fans melt together like coloured marshmallows in a hot back seat.

“It’s for season two of The Haunting of Hill House!” he finally manages to say, and he throws himself, still snickering, into one of her rickety plastic chairs, which promptly breaks into razor sharp plastic splinters, one of which cuts into his rib. He squawks in protest, and then he’s dripping blood, real blood, in large gouts, on her balcony.

He squints and says, in the Castiel voice, “I don’t like this dream,” and she’s back in bed. She shudders as she realizes something’s wrong.

There’s a Leviathan lurching toward her from her bedroom door.

Lis reaches for consciousness.

The Leviathan in the corner is now _stuffed_. It is a human-size stuffed Leviathan, and it’s still got the price tag on it. She tries to get out of bed to read the price tag _because hey, this should be funny_ , and instead the bed picks itself up and throws itself backward.

 _Take me to the fucking bunker,_ Lis says to the beta blockers dancing through her system, as she’s deafened by the sound of rushing wind. She’s elsewhere without moving, as one is, in dreams.

“You’re a profane old lady.” Rowena’s voice arrives in style, a cluster of gorgeous vowels and cut glass consonants. There’s a purple puff of smoke and light and a cup of tea.

_You reading my mind?_

There’s the recollection that this is Lis’s own fine take on Ruth Connell done up in shining black lace and scarlet silk with black kid flats, as if she’s weaponizing her lack of height. Her shining eyes and warm smile are too much, and really, never enough.

“Are you brave enough to drink it?” and now her eyebrows are like God rooting for Jesus on the cross.

“I won’t taste it,” Lis hears herself say. “And in my family, we don’t take food or drink from people in our dreams.”

“You won’t take food that’s offered you by someone inside your own head?”

“It might be poisoned,” Lis said.

Now her voice is treacle on a razor blade. “You do realize how daft that sounds.”

“Give it to me then, I’m thirsty,” and Osric Chau rollerblades into the room, done up as a commedia dell’arte harlequin. He drinks the tea while slowly pirouetting, a droll expression on his face, and rolls out again, teacup now upended over his head.

Lis has about two seconds to consider why her brain would put an actor of Chinese descent into whiteface and then hears a wonderful and familiar voice.

“Idjit.”

“Jim or Bobby?” Lis hears herself say.

“Wouldn’t get too worked up about it either way. C’mon, time to drop out of hyperdrive or whatever you got goin’ on right now.”

She turns to look at him. He’s in a ball cap, jeans and a beat up old car coat. “I could use a hug,” Lis said.

“Idear has some appeal,” Jim Beaver’s meat suit said.

He smelled like Old Spice, in her dream; con reports said she was dead wrong on that, but the beta blockers settled on Old Spice. He didn’t hug her for long. She got the impression he had to be somewhere.

 

She woke up, remembered that she’d talked to Ruth-as-Rowena, and wrote down what she could. Already she could feel it fading. It was midmorning before she remembered that she’d dreamed about Misha as well, and how hilarious _that_ had been until he’d practically sliced himself into ribbons on her stupid chair.

 

“I should replace those chairs.”

 

She made a list of all the characters/actors she hadn’t seen. It irritated her no end that Crowley hadn’t come yet, and that J2M, having made an early appearance, didn’t seem to want to return, however flagrantly she invited them.

Lis wanted to see Anna, and Abaddon, and Death, and Missouri; Ruby and Meg and Claire and Jody and Donna; Garth and Eileen and Mary and Jack.

 

 

Two days later Misha takes a break from the election and mentions in his twitter feed that he had a dream about being asked to read for season two of The Haunting of Hill House, and, just like in the movies, Lis drops her coffee mug.

It cost twenty bucks at a con, and now it’s nasty daggers of overpriced ceramic, all over her damned floor.

“Shit,” Lis says blankly, and cleans up the mess.

It was a helluva coincidence, but not one worth breaking a commemorative mug over.

 

It’s ten o’clock, and long dark outside, and Lis is lying in bed crying, because she doesn’t want to sleep.

 

That night Death arrives. He has a ceramic calzone pin for her, a nice callback to the broken mug, she thinks, and he smiles a thin, knowing smile, as he pins it on her.

“You have questions,” he said.

“It’s not your business to provide answers,” Lis replies. She stabs herself accidentally on the calzone pin and a trinity of blood drops marks the floor in a perfect triangle.

“I really don’t like the sight of blood,” Death says, and faints.

She wakes up killing herself laughing. Maybe sleep is okay. She settles back down, determined to enjoy the ride for as long as she can.

 

 

She’s in a horrible dungeon. Cracks of torchlight bleed through the darkness, and she hears a droning voice chanting a ritual, Latin mixed with Enochian by the sound of it, so she looks around for a weapon and waits.

The door swings open, and she moves toward the sound. Instead of a ritual, it’s Crowley, talking to himself as he sits in front of a quilting frame, patiently hand-sewing stitches into a Dresden plate quilt.

“Need any help?”

“‘M almost finished,” Crowley says under his breath. At her expression, he makes a face. “What did you _think_ my hobby would be? Eating babies is messy, and you’ve got nothing to show for it at the end but little finger bones in your jakes.”

 

Once again, Lis wakes laughing. She writes down what she can and waits for the next instalment.

 

Garth tries to pull all her teeth. She feels a tremendous yank, terrifying really, and he produces a single large phoney tooth, like you’d find in a dentist’s office. It’s bigger than her mouth.

“Things are always bigger on the inside,” he says, nodding with a serious expression.

 

 

Abaddon is manspreading her way across the Throne of Hell and she says, “KILL HER!” and her minions approach and start tickling her.

Lis pees her bed as she’s waking up. Being tickled terrifies her. Being eaten by a Leviathan is scary. Being tickled is worse.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says to her sodden sheets as she peels off her nightdress and hauls it and her bedding down the hallway and into the elevator to start a load of laundry at the three in the morning.

The bed’s still wet; she grabs a sleeping bag and heads for her sofa.

 

“You have to let go,” Charlie says, from the overstuffed armchair that Lis hasn’t sat in since the divorce.

Eileen is sitting next to her on the loveseat, nodding.

“You two were never in the same episode,” Lis mumbles. “I don’t have to let go of anything, you’re a side effect.”

“How very skeptical of you,” Eileen says. She grins and Charlie and she share a glance. “But Misha and you had the same dream.”

“Yes,” Lis said waspishly, “The same dream that somebody besides the Cheeto-in-Chief could be president, along with half of the planet.”

“The fandom connects us all,” Eileen says. Now she’s Shoshannah; the plaid’s gone and her hair’s done up pretty. Lis waits for a comment about Deaf culture or queerbaiting or how a dozen really bad scripts can’t kill 14 years of awesome.

“Yeah yeah one big happy wincestuous family,” Lis said finally.

“The sum is more than its parts,” Charlie said, cocking an eyebrow and shaking her head just a tiny tiny bit at that comment.

“Yes, yes, stone soup,” Lis said, shrugging and sitting up. “It’s important because it’s about the fundamental aspects of human existence, family, belief, living with pain and loss and bad calls, pushing on through when you can’t go another step.”

“And swag,” Eileen says.

There’s a loud knock on the door, four bangs and then three, ‘car ry on my — way ward son’ and Lis wakes up. She’s no longer dreaming. It’s six-thirty in the morning and the knock comes again and she almost cries because she’s genuinely frightened this time, not dream frightened, but frightened because nobody ever bangs on her door at this time of day unless it’s bad news and craziness — or cops.

 

It’s Gabby.

She says, “Are you okay? Sam and Dean came to me in a dream and told me to get my ass over here right now!” At Lis’s expression she said, “My neighbour was up, he’s keeping an eye on the kids.”

“Oh,” Gabby adds. “And I was supposed to bring you this.”

It matches the one Lis dropped. She bursts into tears and falls into Gabby’s arms.

“Shit, this whole dream thing’s been really rough on you,” Gabby says.

“It really has, except the good parts.”

 

They spend twenty minutes reviewing the dreams; both of them laugh and cry and shudder. Then Gabby rises and says, “Yeah, you know I can’t stay.”

“Keep on writing,” Lis says faintly, and after she closes the door behind her friend, she goes to the kitchen and starts some coffee, to celebrate the supernatural revival of her mug.

 

The dreams stop.

 

The fandom, however …

**Author's Note:**

> Beta blockers do indeed cause richly intense and cinematic dreams, usually for a short period of time after they're prescribed. 
> 
> Hope you had fun! Sorry if I left your fave secondary character out.


End file.
